"Immiseration is important, but... societies can... be pretty stable with quite a lot of immiseration. As long as the elites are united and the state is strong, the state can suppress all those peasant rebellions... All "successful" revolutions and civil wars were the result of the intraelite conflicts. Even today, if you look at Donald Trump, who is sort of the main "revolutionary" so to speak, ...he is not particularly immiserated himself, but hes channeling... the tens of millions of immiserated Americans."
Peter Valentinovich Turchin is a Russian-American scientist who specializes in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies.
"The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks."
"Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected... the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability."
"Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom."
"Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability..."
"All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020."
"How resilient are our societies to internal and external shocks?"